Fuzix for Microbee on UBEE512

[Graham72]

Knowing that emulation is all good and proper for those of us who have no access to bare metal, I took some sneaky shortcuts with VibeDroneQueen to get FUSIX booting.

BUT a real machine needs to be able to boot the image via hardware. So towards that end I have got the OS booting on UBEE512. The ubee512 screenshots are all simultaneous, using CTRL 1 thru CTRL 4 to show each TTY in operation.

I am not sure if the HD18 ROM can be used in real 512K machines, but if another ROM is needed then I can adapt the boot code to suit.

[Graham72]

And internet is reached!

I originally tried COM0COM but Windows 11 integrity check blocked that. Older versions of Windows may be more gracious.

So using a 14 day free trial of https://www.serialtool.com/_en/index.php (which also provides Mac & Linux versions) I created a COM to COM pair, COM 5 is paired to COM 6.

Inside FUZIX VTX receives through /dev/modem, so the kernel catches each byte on the interrupt. It still sends keys and pulse-dials by bit-banging PIO B itself. FROG goes entirely through /dev/modem: read to receive, write to send, and the pulse-dial ioctl to dial. It has no PIO code of its own.

A Node.js gateway on COM6 acts as the modem: vtx: vtx3_gateway.js answers vtx’s dialling and connects it over TCP to Telstar (glasstty.com:6502).
frog: frog_gateway.js answers frog’s ATDT frogfind.com:80, then fetches searches and pages on the PC.

The gateway also spaces bytes so the Microbee keeps up. As you can see on the Telstar page a bit occasionally gets dropped.

The entry in ubee512RC:

[fuzix]
--model=p512k
--rom1=HD18.ROM
--hdd1=fuzix81l.hdd-610-4-32
--rtc=1
--piob7=rtc
--title="FUZIX"
--status=+title
--coms=5
--baudrx=1200
--baudtx=75
--datab=8


So UBEE512 FUZIX loads, runs and connects to text based internet.

[Graham72]

latest builds https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OWvCDb7...sp=sharing